Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The clouds were frightfully low now, the wind whipping at the tablecloth and upsetting the tea setting. A bright flash of lightning arced down, followed moments later by thunder, as a violent storm made itself known. Or worse; looking up, Codswallop noted the ominous low-hanging clouds and rotation that portended a cyclone.

“Does madam think that, perhaps, it might be time to move the tea indoors?” he cried, doing his best to shield Rags from the wind and the first light sprinklings of hail.

“Oh, far from it!” Lady Vanessa cried. “I told you that my dear Jonathan had ascended from his earthly body to become a thunder spirit, and now he has finally accepted my invitation to tea! I mustn’t disappoint him.”

Codswallop looked up, looked back at Lady Vanessa seated calmly as the green fell apart around her, and nodded curtly. “If you’ll excuse us a moment, my lady,” he said. “My compatriot and I are off in search of a dry crumpet.” He took Rags by the hand and led them both, forcefully, back to the manor house.

“Don’t be long!” Vanessa cried behind them. “Oh, Jonathan, it’s been so long! I have so much to tell you now that we’re reunited!”

Rags did not protest or struggle, but instead looked back at the unfolding scene. As Codswallop led them back to the manor and calmly smashed out one of its cellar windows, the low clouds dart earthward in the form of a twister, kicking up dust and debris as it traveled.

“Come, Rags,” said Codswallop. “We should get away from the windows, lest they become fancy shrapnel.”

Rags, though, snuck one last look, and saw the twister hungrily devouring the long table and tea settings, with the Lady Vanessa lifted bodily up, a smile on her face and petticoats flapping, until she vanished in the funnel.

“Come now,” Codswallop said again, leading Rags deeper into the shelter of the cellar. “Lady Vanessa has gotten what she wanted, but I don’t think you or I would care for the same gift.”

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Caius leaned against a column, looking into the showroom of CALIGVLES ARE VS even as the bouncer kept a wary eye on him. The new sandals for 120CE were in, and most prominent among them were the feathered footwear of the Quicksilver line, endorsed by the god Mercury himself.

But just as prominent was the price tag of 100 secteres, more than Caius could hope to make in a year. He was sure that with sandals like that he could unlock his true potential and become a professional athlete, sweeping the Olympic games and perhaps even meeting Mercury in person.

But those dreams would have to wait. Caius could spare perhaps two secteres, and that was if he regarded food as optional for the next two weeks. That wasn’t enough for the Herakles Hobnails, even though everyone knew that brand had gone downhill since Hercules had ascended to godhood. It would only buy one-half of the cheapest sandals the place had, the Caligula Specials.

Caius had begin making desperate plans to steal the Quicksilvers when the guard finally grew impatient with his gawking and drove him off.

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Eggnog on elm trees
Holly boughs in the field
The season comes to be
Though it doesn’t seem real
Tinsel in hedgerows
And garlands on eves
With youth wonder grows
But with age it recedes

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Reportedly, the Murphys had first put Betty behind the wheel when they realized that the cops were less likely to hassle a woman driver—at least over what was in her cargo area, anyway. But once they realized just how good she was, Betty became their go-to getaway driver, easily supplanting her cousins due to a record of avoiding the cops and making moonshine runs on the quickfast.

But when the illicit moonshine races began to take a turn toward respectability and the track, Betty saw herself shut out. Boss Halloran, who ran the track, wouldn’t accept a woman as a competitor, and nor would most of his racers. Betty raced a few times in disguise as her cousin Billy, but each time the charade was found out and a hurious Halloran had the race re-run without her.

Incensed, Betty decided to pool her money for an all-female race, the very first Lace Lightning. In the retelling, years later, and in the slick made-for-TV movie a network slapped together, the first Lace Lightning was a roaring success and ended sexism in the county for good.

Reality was not quite so kind. Though it was well-attended and popular, the first Lace Lightning did not make back its money, and the prize pot bankrupted Betty Murphy. It wasn’t until 1972 that the Lace Lightning race became a truly annual tradition, and although Betty Murphy served as honorary grand marshal until her death in 1995, she did so from poverty—the organizers of the event named in her honor couldn’t afford to do anything but comp her gas and meals.

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Nana had always been very clear: if there was an oddity in the house, it was because Grandpapa (God rest his weary soul) had built it that way. Sam had never known Grandpapa—he had died during the Reagan administration—but he had also built Nana’s house with his own two hands, when he wasn’t busy rebuilding carburetors (also with his own bare hands). A mechanic by trade, he’d lived in a loft above his garage before building the house as a wedding present for Nana during their engagement.

Sam couldn’t help but think that Grandpapa (God rest his tired old bones) had been a better mechanic than a carpenter, because Nana’s house had all sorts of oddities. The bathroom was a mere closet, barely enough for Nana’s toilet and shower, but it also included the stairs to the attic. The root cellar, directly beneath Nana’s kitchen, was dug out of the dirt with nothing but floorboards over it, so the kitchen sagged under the weight of Nana’s oven and visibly flexed as she walked. The furnace was out in the living room, out in the open, as if Grandpapa (God rest his tired head) had gotten fed up when carrying it in and just installed it where it had been delivered.

But then there was the doorknob, the one attached to a seemingly solid beam inside the master closet. Nana said that it was there to bridge a gap, that it was a load-bearing knob and not to be touched, even though it led nowhere and did nothing.

But Sam had always wanted to try it. And so one day, when Nana was asleep on her favorite couch, with her favorite soap, Sam had snuck into the closet and grasped the knob. Shockingly, it turned. Even more shockingly, it opened with the sound of a latch popping.

“Who’s there?” a voice cried from below. “That you, Agnes?”

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“So what have we got here?” said Lampwick O’Malley, investigating detective, Magical Affairs Bureau.

“Well, the deceased came running at Officer Strasser, screaming like a banshee; Officer Strasser, thinking that they might have been armed, shot them with 17 magic missiles,” said Lt. Burke, chief uniform on the scene.

“Whew! Good reflexes on that guy,” said O’Malley. “Put him on paid administrative leave while we fill out the paperwork. Oh, and make sure the perp’s wand is tagged and bagged.”

“Oh, there was no wand, sir,” said Burke. “Turns out the perp was not holding anything and was also on fire, sir. Seems he was rushing toward Officer Strasser in search of aid.”

“Ah well. Honest mistake,” shrugged O’Malley. “See that a wand turns up anyway, with its serial number sanded off.”

“Got it, sir.”

“So why was the perp on fire?” O’Malley said. “Drugs? Was he doing firesand?”

“Oh. No, he was apparently trying to refill a lava lamp with actual lava from the Elemental Plane of Fire,” Burke said.

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“The lines are just…so straight.”

“Don’t act so surprised. Given an infinite universe, it was inevitable.”

“What kind of geologic processes could have created this sort of thing? Life and civilization readings were negative.”

“Look, why are you so upset about this?”

“I know that anything is possible in an infinite universe, okay? But that still didn’t prepare me for Plaid Planet.”

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The hermit crab scuttled merrily around its holographic enclosure, to general acclaim and applause from the members of the club.

“It looks so lifelike!” said Nex. “How did you manage it! My holographic axolotl is nowhere near as good.”

“Well, I started with video footage. There’s not a lot left, but combined with descriptions I was able to work out a pretty good pseudorandom algorithm.”

“What about the eating behavior?” Zak asked.

“I looked in the genetics database and analyzed a few peptides. It was a best guess, but I think it was pretty close.”

“Yeah,” Nex agreed. “Very close. Considering they’ve been extinct for a hundred years, it’s definitely the best holographic animal so far.”

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By this point, the remaining House Depository megastore employees had accepted that Shawn had gone completely feral, due to a combination of whatever had been in Sissy’s pills and general hypoglycemia. The priority was containing him and tying him down with nylon straps from the loading dock before he could bite anybody else.

Corralled by JJ on one side and Devin on the other, Shawn had retreated into the plumbing section, gibbering as he flitted between the imposing bathroom fixtures. Cartigainer ordered JJ and Devin to head in, either to catch their wayward coworker or at least to flush him out into a trap laid by the stockers.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” JJ said, her face red. “You want us to go into that porcelain jungle along with nothing but a polesaw without the saw? You saw what Shawn did to HD the Bear!”

Cartigainer looked over his shoulder at the teddy bear in a purple Home Depository apron, its head torn off and stuffing spilled from its torn belly like fresh offal. “We’re all in mourning for HD,” he said sadly, “but his sacrifice is in vain if we can’t catch Shawn. Now get in there.”

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“So.” Ms. Lancaster folded her arms. “You were assigned a report on microclimates.”

“That’s right,” said SJ, irked at being held back after class. “But I did an experiment instead. You said we could.”

“Oh yes,” Ms. Lancaster said, gesturing to the box on her table, which contained a very damp thimble. “So you thought you’d be a smartass and give me a wet thimble as a ‘micro climate.’ Very cute.”

“It’s a real microclimate!” SJ insisted. “I put a lot of work into it. That water is rain.”

“Uh huh.” Ms. Lancaster said, writing in her gradebook.

“It’s not my fault that the ambient humidity was too low for it to work right away,” SJ continued. “But it’s been an hour, it should be just about ready.”

“Uh huh,” repeated Ms. Lancaster. A moment later, she jumped and instinctively pushed her chair back violently at the sound of a peal of thunder and a crackling of electricity from the thimble, which set part of the box on fire.

“See? What did I tell you?” SJ said, triumphantly. “Microclimate. Just like what’s-his-butt was saying about a tempest in a teapot.”

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